This PHD thesis follows our previous work in three research projects funded by the French national research Agency (ANR): ANR CECIL project, ANR MOCA project and ANR SOMBRERO project. These projects have contributed to the ongoing development of our Cognitive and Affective Interaction-Oriented architecture called CAIO (see Best Late Breaking Report Nomination paper [10]).

The goals of this PhD thesis are threefold:

· to fully implement this architecture and experimentation scenarios, using a lightweight humanoid robot (for instance a Nao robot)

· to propose an evaluation method and criteria, and apply this to experimentally evaluate the architecture at all stages of development

· to identify from these experimentations the necessary additions to improve the social capabilities of robots endowed with this architecture, and to realise some of these, for instance: